Clinton, MA – Russia Orders Immediate Return of Artworks from Museum

Clinton, MA – Russia’s Ministry of Culture has ordered the Museum of Russian Icons in Clinton to dismantle its exhibit of 37 icons and artifacts on loan from Russia and send them back.

Gordon Lankton, founder of the Clinton museum, said the museum received a call Monday saying that the works in the “Treasures From Moscow” show must be returned.

While no reason was given, it wasn’t difficult to figure out. Russian museums have been canceling loans of artwork to the United States as a result of a feud that began last summer over a US court decision. Last July a federal judge ordered Russia to return items that an organization in Brooklyn, N.Y., claimed were being held illegally.

The legal dispute centers on the so-called Schneerson Library, a collection of 12,000 books and 50,000 religious documents assembled by the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement over two centuries before World War II, and kept since in Russia.

For decades the Chabad organization, which is based in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, has been trying to regain possession of the library, saying that it was illegally held by the Soviet authorities after the war.

In 1991 a court in Moscow ordered the library turned over to the Chabad organization; the Soviet Union then collapsed, and the judgment was set aside by the Russian authorities.

The Russian government now says it wants to preserve the library for Russian Jews and scholars.

In recent years the organization has taken its case to court in the United States, and on July 30, 2010, Royce C. Lamberth, a federal judge of the United States District Court in Washington, ruled in favor of the Chabad organization, ordering Russia to turn over all Schneerson documents held at the Russian State Library, the Russian State Military Archive and elsewhere.

Russian officials, saying that an American court had no jurisdiction, had refused to participate in the proceedings. And after Judge Lamberth’s decision, the Russian Foreign Ministry denounced it as a violation of international law. The ministry said an American court had no right to get involved in a case concerning Russian assets on Russian soil.

Russian cultural officials reacted more slowly, but by autumn they began warning Russia’s state-controlled museums that any artwork lent to the United States was at risk of being seized by the American authorities to force Russia to abide by the decision.

The exhibit on loan in Clinton opened in October, and was scheduled to run through July 25.